My Goals for 2024 include participating in three reading challenges: books in translation, epistolary fiction, and historical fiction, with the aim of writing two posts about what I read. Here is my first post!
It took two tries for me to finish The Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. My aborted first effort ended when I had to return the book before I finished it, as a consequence of moving to the Netherlands. My new public library was able to purchase a copy and I started again from the beginning and finished it in late February.
[Digression: some advice for users of the public library system in Utrecht. If you are very impatient to get your hands on a book, and it is available at other public libraries in the Netherlands, and you are able to afford a surcharge, consider paying 5€ to order it by interlibrary loan. Purchase suggestions have the advantage of being free but might take five or six months to arrive.]
My interest in the Strugatskys began six or seven years ago when an acquaintance raved about Alexsei German's 2013 film Hard to be a God. To illustrate his point, he showed a clip in which the main character, Don Rumata, sits in a filthy medieval hall among the ruins of a feast and plays the blues on a makeshift clarinet. I was deeply intrigued but never got around to watching the film.
A few years later, I realised that the film was based on a book, and stumbled on a copy of Hard to Be a God the book at the library. It was one of my favourite books I read in 2021, and remains among my favourite works of science fiction. It's absorbing and violent and weird and beautiful and haunting, and asks unanswerable questions about suffering and empathy, scholarly neutrality, and human capacity for change. I read the translation by Olena Bormashenko, published by Gollancz in their SciFi masterworks series. Weirdly, Gollancz does not list Bormashenko's name anywhere on their website--if you search for her there, there are no results. The websites of all the major book retailers follow suit. I was only able to check this detail by getting my copy off my shelf and looking at the title page.
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| The Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky |
I stress this point because, while I am 99.9% sure that I did in fact read Olena Bormashenko's translation of The Snail on the Slope, the book page on the Gollancz's website does not mention her, and hence neither do webpages anywhere else. I returned the book to the library so I can't actually check the title page. In the United States, Bormashenko's translation was published by Chicago Review Press, and her name is on the front cover, and included where this book is sold or listed in catalogues. So it is perfectly possible! I really dislike that U.K. edition hides the translator's name, especially since Bormashenko has such interesting things to say about the importance of the Strugatskys, their place in the science fiction genre, and the process of translating their work.
I don't read Russian, so here end my attempts to comment on the fact that this book is a translation. On to the book itself!
Whoever wrote the back cover did an excellent job of introducing the book, so I will quote this in full:
ENTER THE ADMINISTRATION
Peretz spends his days navigating the bureaucracy of the Administration, the institute tasked with governing the Forest below. Except no one ever seems to go there, and his attempts only trap him further within the workings of this strange organisation.
ENTER THE FOREST
Candide cannot remember how he got to the Forest, and he is certain he belongs somewhere else. Determined to escape, he finds that all paths lead him round strange bends and into encounters with bizarre creatures.
NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS
This classic SF novel sees Boris and Arkady Strugatsky meditate on how little man can understand of the wider world, and in doing so produce one of the great literary works to come out of Soviet Russia.
Do not read this book if you are in the mood for something that makes sense. Do not read this book if you are in the mood for certainties. Do not read this book if you want to be convinced that people are basically good at heart.
Do read this book if you feel like indulging in a wild, trippy, fever dream of a book. Do read this book if you have ever dealt with an insane, arcane, contradictory bureaucracy that seems to invent new tasks and rules and paperwork faster than you can keep with the old ones and it would comfort you to watch fictional characters deal with something similar. People who work in higher education may want to read this book as a form of catharsis. Do read this book if you enjoy stories where "nothing really happens". (Not strictly true of this book at all, but the story-shape of The Snail on the Slope is definitely more of a spiral or a labyrinth than a straight line.) Do read this book if you are the sort of person who enjoys Tolstoy's digressions about the nature of history or Victor Hugo exhaustively detailing the Paris sewer system.
One thing I noticed reading English translations of Andrzej Sapkowski, and that I've found similar in reading the Strugatskys so far, is that the pace of the narrative feels much more meditative and expansive than Anglophone sci-fi and fantasy writing--even though the stories contain a similar level of eventfulness. Things keep coming and they don't stop coming, but the way events are introduced, and the way that characters ruminate on and respond to them, feels gorgeously and expansively slow.
One of my favourite passages of this nature occurs fairly early in the book when Peretz contemplates books on a bookshelf.
Don't just stand there, he told the books. Slackers! Is that what you were written for? Go on, report to me--how's the sowing progressing, how much have you sown? How much that's good, kind, eternal? And what are the prospects for the harvest? And most important, what has already sprouted? You're quiet...Take you, what do I call you, yes you, the two-volume tome! How many people have read you? And how many have understood you? I really love you, old thing, you're a kind and honest friend. You've never yelled, never bragged, never beat your chest. Yes, you're kind and honest. And those who read you also become kind and honest. Even if only for a time. Even if only with themselves...
But you know, some people believe that we don't particularly need kindness and honesty to move forward. We need feet. And shoes. And even unwashed feet and unpolished shoes will do...Progress may turn out to be completely indifferent to the notions of kindness and honesty, just like it has been indifferent to them thus far. ~ The Snail on the Slope, Arkady and Boris Strugasky, translated by Olena Bormashenko (London, 2019), p. 51
I couldn't get this passage out of my head after I first read it. "We need feet. And shoes." is well on its way to becoming a phrase I quote to myself when faced with particular views of what the Strugatskys call progress. Structurally and thematically, there is a lot about this book I know I missed: I haven't even mentioned the novel's female characters, or anything at all about the other viewpoint character, Candide. This is a book I know I will reread at some point. I wonder what I will notice then?
A treat of the Gollancz edition is the afterword by Boris Strugatsky, which explains the genesis of the novel and its complicated road to publication. Glancing at other reviews, it seems that some people recommend reading the afterword first to prepare for what lies ahead. I don't think it's necessary, but it's fun, when you've finished the book and are sitting there, shaking your head and swearing softly, to get a peek behind the magicians' curtain.
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